Microsoft announced last week a raft of new features for retail workers, one of which enables businesses to connect a calling plan to a Front Line Worker license, F1 or F3.
Microsoft have been gathering feedback from many retail and manufacturing clients – one of the main ones being that the Teams Phone licenses simply do not fit the Front Line Worker scenario due to cost.
By working with these clients, it was clear that Microsoft was not achieving the numbers of enabled FLW in many organizations where the same group of employees were in the majority compared to Information Workers. In order to address this, the newly announced plan is around $4 per user, per month, but with the caveat that it only connects to an F license.
The functionality is reduced, however, as the typical front line worker device may be a shared device, tablet or hardened Android device that gets passed from person to person. This is a very common scenario when you consider retail, public sector and manufacturing that operate multiple shift patterns. People want to reach the identity e.g. manager or responsible person rather than a specific individual.
Back in October Microsoft released a Teams shared device license
This was to address the pushback that many organizations had where they were expected to pay for a common area phone license. Microsoft have changed the scope for the license where you can now have a Teams shared device license to cover meeting rooms, common area phones, hot desks and shared devices. With this add-on, an organization can designate many devices attached to a single calling plan without needing to have one per device.
The Microsoft Teams Shared Devices license includes the following service plans:
- Microsoft Teams
- Microsoft Teams Phone (Previously known as Phone System)
- Microsoft Intune (Microsoft Intune Plan 1 and Plan 2)
- Microsoft Entra ID P1
- Exchange Online Plan (Cloud-based voicemail capabilities only.)
These new licensing options are great, but how do you assess what are the right devices and correct users to share these new licenses with?
Advanced analytics from Clobba does just that. For example, identify users that have not used telephony features in the last 30, 60 or 90 days with ease. Data is easy to configure with drag and drop monitors to show exactly the information you need to see.
Drill down into specific usage reports, then drag and drop the required views into the task bar and filter on license to get to the usable data easily.
Contact our team today for a demo and see how you can drive your investment in Microsoft technologies.
